


Flotsam

by Pigeon_theoneandonly



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Mass Effect 2, Survival, none of the other warnings remotely apply, note: chose not to use archive warnings to avoid giving away shepard's fate, shepard survives the normandy attack... or does she?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26343958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeon_theoneandonly/pseuds/Pigeon_theoneandonly
Summary: Shepard survived the attack on the Normandy SR-1.  But now, caught alone in the harsh vacuum of space, can she find a way to live?
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard
Comments: 18
Kudos: 32





	Flotsam

For the first few hours, the sound of her breath, loud in her ears, and the slow slithery shiver of adrenaline draining from her body proved sufficient companions to distract her from hopelessness. Several hundred meters away, the wreckage of _Normandy’s_ riven fuselage began to cool.

Shepard revolved slowly in the void. There was absolutely nothing to stop her. She suspected it would get old fast, but for now she had bigger problems. She tapped away at her omni-tool and projected a display of biometric indicators onto the inside of her helmet’s visor. Her suit wasn’t compromised or she’d be long dead already. Some percussive trauma from the explosion, and a hell of a welt where she hit the bulkhead on her way out. Her head and shoulders ached something fierce.

Nothing life-threatening. She moved down her list of priorities. Water reservoir: meager, but full. Food: none. (Technically, a bag of dried fruit in her pouch, but it might as well be on the planet below for all the good it did her now.) Carbon air filters: new, with seven full days of use remaining. 

After weeks of moping about no action, scanning geth in the Terminus, Kaidan finally convinced her to tend her gear. Yesterday. It took a few long breaths to suppress the could-have-been panic, so tangible that her blood pressure spiked. The old gunked-up filters wouldn’t have lasted seven hours, let alone seven days.

She could only hope her shouting at him had returned the favor, that he’d boarded an escape shuttle and saved his life. The shuttles had streaked across Alchera’s thin sky while she sat here turning like a spit roast, hair floating in her helmet and getting in her eyes, trailing plasma until they vanished into specks, and then into nothing. 

The spinning really was growing tired with nothing in reach to arrest it. Her gun would’ve been very useful about now, a slow and dirty method to propel herself. Shepard supposed she should count herself lucky it wasn’t faster, some dizzying speed meant to leave her unconscious.

A bubble of laughter escaped her mouth. Then another. It grew into a chuckle and then a full-grown hysterical cackle. _Lucky_. That was funny. She’d never heard anything funnier in her life.

Enough of that. Third priorities. Comms. Shepard began scanning all the frequencies, standard and emergency both, and winced as _Normandy’s_ beacon screeched into her ear. It cleared the ship before the explosion. She closed her eyes; that was one worry down. However, no amount of fiddling would persuade her transmitter to work. She was on her own.

No remedy but to wait. The Alliance would respond, because there was no other option, and Shepard refused to accept defeat. She shut her eyes and folded her arms over her chest, intending sleep. Then spread them wide again as it only served to speed up that infernal spin.

* * *

By the second day, the silence bothered her as much as spinning without cessation. That, and the dark. When they were on the far side of Alchera and its bulk blocked Amada’s light, Shepard couldn’t see a hand before her face. She fought the urge to activate her headlamps. No pressing need for illumination existed, and it would only run down her batteries, which were much better spent on other trivialities like air circulation. 

She sang, for a time, in the dark. Never had much of a voice. Never cared for music, if it came to that. But it was the only company she had. 

* * *

Debris glittered in the twilight. They were headed into another night, all of them together, these slowly whirling fragments of her ship, all moving at slightly different velocities. Her only entertainment these long hours was watching them dance and collide and drift away again. 

Her proximity alert began to sound.

Shepard was famed for her reflexes. Those instincts, that hair-trigger reaction time, had kept her alive through a decade of military service and every scrape that came before. They made her the pride of the navy, the first human spectre. Chosen by a turian of all people. She chuckled to herself. Her mother hadn’t believed it, at the time. 

The alert continued to beep insistently.

That was important, wasn’t it? Had to be. When one second blurred into hours like this with no sign of passing, urgency ceased to exist, and thought became a fog. Like breathing through molasses.

 _Proximity alarm_ flashed on her HUD. 

Proximity alarm. Proximity alarm!

Her eyes flew wide. She jerked instinctively, trying to look behind her, and that motion only added another axis to her tumble. But it did bring the offending object into few. A composite panel with a ceramic-slathered titanium skin, a portion of the upper section of the ship, stenciled part and serial numbers winking in the sunset. It traveled sedately in a straight path with no notable additional motion.

Directly towards her, in fact. 

She flailed uselessly. Unsurprisingly, the bit of space junk did not care.

At the last second she braced herself, her forearms flying in front of her fragile visor and taking the brunt of the impact. All the air went out of her as her teeth clacked together. If it slowed even a fraction, she couldn’t tell. She thought her right arm might be broken. A blinking message on her HUD confirmed it.

Shepard took a heavy breath, and then another. No hiss of air accompanied the hiss of pain in her limb. No spiderweb cracks splayed across her vision, threatening to shatter. She got hold of herself.

The panel continued to push her along like a plow. They were in no immediate risk of further collision. And—

The spinning…

_Oh sweet, merciful fate, the spinning had stopped._

And, to her delight after tentative experimentation, she could move. Really move, with purpose put her body someplace else, by pulling herself along the much heavier piece of her ship. 

Curling her good arm around its rough edge, clinging to her driftwood like a child, she fell into her first restful sleep.

* * *

Her mouth was parched. No better than half-awake, she sucked instinctively at the tube in her helmet. She got down two whole mouthfuls before she realized and spat out the tube in a panic. Frantically, she cued up her monitor, and her face fell into her boots. Less than a quarter remained. 

It was hunger, she decided. Over the past day she’d become increasingly lightheaded. The ache in her gut had passed, but that was hardly reassuring. 

_Normandy’s_ emergency beacon continued to blare. One had joined it from the ground, a counterpoint lasting approximately an hour out of each orbit. So some of her crew had survived. At least when she died here, that wouldn’t weigh on her conscience.

Shepard did not dare allow herself to wonder if Kaidan was among them. Down that path lay madness. Or at least a decent nervous breakdown.

Her head rested against the panel. It made for a comfortable enough bed in microgravity. Something solid to ground her. It had gotten colder, too. Vacuum turned her suit into a thermos but a little heat seeped, regardless; had to, or her suit would cook her alive. Kaidan liked to read. Always had his nose in his datapad, every minute of downtime aboard ship, at least when he wasn’t tinkering with his omni-tool. Shepard smiled fondly. What was that one he kept poking her to try?

Ah, yes. Her smile broadened. _A Fire Upon the Deep._ Also, loosely, about a shipwreck. It felt appropriate.

Hope grew thinner by the moment, not as a matter of faith, but of pragmatism. She might as well burn the power. A command to her omni-tool projected the first page onto her helmet visor. 

Her eyebrows rose with every chapter. Shepard enjoyed a good genre novel as much as the next person, but this was ridiculous. Sometimes she couldn’t believe his affection for this sort of thing. He really was such a nerd.

* * *

It had gotten very cold, now. Frost crowded the edges of her visor, growing with every expelled breath and robbing her of what little moisture remained in her mouth. The pain in her stomach had returned.

A few bars of a song mumbled between her chattering teeth. Some asari pop hit. Tali had been singing it for days, getting it all stuck in their heads on loop. It had driven Shepard to distraction. She’d give anything for it to distract her now. Dying slowly wasn’t exactly in the marine handbook. More than once, her good hand had wandered to her helmet seal, and contemplated just being done with it. 

But marines didn’t give up. Shepard didn’t give up. Even if it was the sanest thing she could possibly do.

Her thoughts had become near-solid sludge. Her oxygen saturation was declining, as her filters were increasingly expended. Doubtless at some point she’d be insensible enough from carbon dioxide poisoning to actually do it. She didn’t find it comforting, nor the right kind of distracting.

Or maybe she’d fall asleep first, slowly drift away into nothingness from lack of oxygen. That seemed… preferable. 

It wasn’t like she hadn’t considered her options. Her raft failed to carry her in reach of anything. They continued to make their slow way towards the fuselage, the largest part of the wreck, but she doubted they would reach it before her luck ran out. She could jump, though she’d have to kick off and leave the raft, a small sacrifice for the greater shelter of her ruined ship. If she hit her target. And they were far enough away, this panel and her, that odds were she’d miss the fuselage entirely.

Shepard tried to remember the next line of the song. Something about crests backlit by twin suns…

Her comm blinked.

She blinked back, utterly confused. The emergency beacons had been filtered out days ago. But she activated the audio.

_“—ormandy, Normandy, Normandy, this is SSV Cairo. Respond, over.”_

Shepard responded without thinking. “Cairo, this is _Normandy_ Actual, over.”

A long pause. “ _Normandy, Normandy, Normandy,_ this is _SSV Cairo_. Respond, over.”

Her transmitter. For a moment, she forgot.

She slumped in her suit as the message continued to repeat, searching the void for survivors. She raised herself up on the raft to peer over the lip. Now that she was looking for it, she could just make out the _Cairo’s_ running lights through the frost, multicolored specks far too orderly to be stars. Maybe fifty or a hundred kilometers off the port bow, in as much as that applied to a wreck. It might as well be light years.

No rescue was coming for her. They had no reason to believe anyone still located at the wreck was alive. 

The line crackled. “ _Cairo,_ this is _Normandy_. You don’t know how glad we are to hear from you.”

Her eyes flew wide. _Kaidan. That was Kaidan._ She clutched the side of her helmet as if it could bring his voice any nearer. _Kaidan was alive. He was speaking to her now._

Well, not her. But she could hear him, and that was enough.

The _Cairo_ asked for details. Kaidan delivered stark facts without any consideration for how they hit her in waves of misery and elation. Twenty-one of her crew were dead. But twenty-three had lived— twenty-four if she bothered to add in herself. They made it to the surface.

His voice caught when he explained he was the highest-ranking officer left alive. Shepard rested her fore-helmet against smooth curve of her raft and shut her eyes, resisting the urge to bang her head. _I’m here. I’m right here. Damn it._

He sent their location, and the _Cairo_ responded by scrambling shuttles. They moved towards her; she guessed from the strength of the transmission that the wreckage and herself with it hung directly over the survivor’s camp. 

Every marine was issued a mirror as part of the standard kit, for signaling. Shepard slipped hers out of its pouch and angled it as best she could, trying to flash it into the video ports of the Kodiaks, without success. They dropped down to Alchera without a twitch of deviation from their course.

There would be one more chance when they came back up. She began to peer around the debris field, more awake than she’d been in days. Maybe she would live through this after all.

* * *

Shepard hung cantilevered off the _Normandy_ panel. It had been her lifeboat, but if she stayed with it now, she’d drown. It should be massive enough to allow her a good kick. This idea had been considered and dismissed several times due to the high margins of error created by distance. But between the raft’s stately forward progress and her slim window of opportunity, its time had arrived.

 _Farewell, friend._ She planted both boots and shoved hard. 

It gave, ever so slightly, but sent her sailing towards the ruined fuselage, and at great enough velocity that she reached it after only five or ten minutes. Her aim was good. She’d worried about missing the target, for all of a few seconds, which was longer than she usually spent contemplating the risks or the odds once she acted. Her extended stay in this lonely wasteland was getting to her.

Catching herself on a twisted beam, once part of _Normandy’s_ backbone, she carefully lowered her feet until the magnets in her soles caught. A giddy smile crossed her face. Part one— success.

She wandered the ruins at a crawling pace. Discovering the intact pack of air filtration cartridges in what remained of the ship’s armory nearly caused a breakdown. Nowhere left was or could be pressurized. And even if she somehow managed to stretch her one working arm far enough to open her suit while equipped, it would only vent her air. It felt like drowning in a fish tank; safety right before her eyes, and Shepard unable to reach through the glass.

The medical supplies presented similar challenges. Her suit material had enough self-healing to withstand a hypodermic prick or two, and it was a moot point anyway, since it relied on elasticity to provide mechanical counterpressure. Vacuum and cold, however, made a ruin of Chakwas’ stores. A crystallized vial of morphine mocked her from her palm. She clenched her fist around it and made a concerted effort to pack away the pain of her fracture, back where it belonged.

Shepard needed a comm. 

No power remained aboard the ship. But power wasn’t her biggest problem. And eventually, she found what she was looking for.

The body turned over easily, if a bit awkward to manhandle. Shepard stared at her for a good long time. Longer, really than she could afford. Her name was Caroline Grenado. She’d been the off-duty co-pilot at the time of the attack, asleep in the hot bunks when the alarm began to sound. Judging by her kit and the fact that her body survived the explosion, she did everything right; got in her suit, ran for the shuttles. The massive storm of fire engulfing Deck 2 caused fluid lines in the hull to explode. One had almost hit Shepard herself as she made for the stairs. 

Shepard removed her helmet with unusual gentleness. Blood clotted in her hair where her head had hit the inside of the helmet, confirming her suspicion about Grenado’s cause of death. Just bad rotten luck. 

Angry, she turned away and squatted upside-down on the deck, peering into the helmet. Alliance wired all their personnel with internal comms. Those short-range devices in turn hooked into mid-range comms like those found in the helmets. But the helmet could also transmit just fine on its own. Fail safes upon fail safes was practically a spaceflight motto.

If her comm’s allegiance could be changed, it was beyond Shepard’s technical skills. So she did the only thing she could. She began tapping the mic. 

Her own receiver confirmed the transmission. Harsh as shit on the ears, but every screech of white noise brought her closer to living another day. Morse code was not her strong suit, but hell, even kids knew how to send S.O.S.

* * *

Her wrist ached like her hand was on the verge of falling off. The distress signal staggered out, disjointed, trailing off. The shuttles had come and gone without slowing down.

It couldn’t end like this. The Alliance actually came to save them. She’d survived the explosion, somehow. She made it back to the ship and damn it, she found a way to communicate. She knew she had the correct channel. What was wrong?

In the distance, the _Cairo’s_ lights shone, sparks of mocking hope. In a fit of frustration and a naked thread of fear, Shepard threw the helmet across the broken room. It sailed on unerringly and bounced off the burnt mass of the opposite bulkhead. Shepard made not even a token attempt to grab it as it ricocheted past her and off into the abyss. 

Her head slumped forward until it was buried in her hands, palms covered her visor, fingertips digging into the tough plastic like they were trying to pierce it through. It couldn’t end like this. Not alone, frozen fast in the dark, fading away, breathing bad air.

It couldn’t.

She hadn’t cried. She didn’t, as a general rule, not to save face but because Shepard counted herself among nature’s stoics. The impulse rarely visited her. But now she took a great heaving breath through her nose, feeling her throat grow thick and hot. 

If she ever gave it half a thought, and she really hadn’t, dwelling in the shadow of her own mortality for her entire career should’ve inured her to this moment, an inoculation against existential dread. And in truth, she’d never been scared to die. And she wasn’t scared now. This… this anxiety, this _dismay_ , it concerned something else. 

Death brought her no terror. She’d been happy. Just for a moment. 

Her eyes squeezed shut. A drop of water slithered down her face and entered the corner of her mouth, a burst of salt. 

_At least Kaidan lived._

The attempt to self-soothe backfired. The dam burst. She hugged her knees up to her chest, rocking back and forth with only her mag boots to hold her down. Goddammit. Life never cared about what she deserved, but did it have to be this fucking unfair? Did this have to happen _now?_

The only sound in the universe was her sniffling and swallowed sobs. Somewhere behind them, a dim, chiding awareness that she could not afford to waste this water, and a louder voice answering that she couldn’t be paid to give a shit. Her one chance at survival hadn’t panned out. It was over.

Then a bit of light trickled between her knees. It took her a second to understand. She raised her head in utter disbelief. 

A Kodiak, slowly nosing through the debris field. Following her signal. 

Shepard rose, slowly, shaking with dehydration and mild CO2 poisoning. Tentatively, she waved her arms as the shuttle turned fully towards her. 

* * *

Fifteen minutes for the Kodiak to reach her and maneuver into a “catch” position felt like fifty years. But eventually, the hatch lifted out and slid to the side. Behind it, faceless people, _Cairo_ crew behind a mass effect field, gestured her to jump.

Even secure in the knowledge that if she missed, they’d circle back and get her, Shepard had no desire to spend another second exposed in space. She positioned herself carefully, disengaged her mag boots, and pushed off, floating as fast as she dared towards safety and life.

As her outstretched hand crossed the field, the nearest crew member grabbed her sore wrist and hauled her in. The sudden reappearance of gravity felt like an anvil dropping on her. She sagged, tugged off her helmet and threw it to the floor, filled her lungs with good clean oxygen in gulping breaths. Then Shepard was yanked upright as someone threw their arms around her and pulled her tight.

Her broken arm twisted. Shepard screamed, that jolt of white-hot pain so unexpected she couldn’t brace herself against the reaction.

Her assailant let go, fast, and stepped back. She saw his face. Kaidan. _Kaidan!_

He seemed to be suffering the same tongue-tying hesitant joy, as if speaking a single word would reveal the trick. 

Words were overrated. She put her good arm around his neck and hugged him close. His arms folded around her, more gently this time, and whispered into her ear. “I knew you were alive. I knew that signal had to be you.”

She pressed her face into his cheek, and let that be enough.


End file.
